Apex Legends Dev Tracker

1. When we started on the Lifeline rework, a number of seasons back, she was a popular pick, but only at lower skill and ranks. Her kit was often referred to both internally and in the community as being outdated and outclassed by other support Legends. Most importantly, she was not hitting the Combat Medic fantasy we wanted from her. We started out with the intent to replace the care package - which in today's Apex, with all the new ways of getting loot felt the most left behind. During development, we found opportunities to improve her entire kit, and make her feel more like the Lifeline we see in trailers and hit on her combat medic fantasy wholesale.

2. Glide was inspired by Lifeline's interactions with D.O.C. in the various trailers and lore segments we've seen through Apex's history, and is something we always wanted to add. From a gameplay standpoint, it let Lifeline keep up with her aggressive teammates more easily and help her shortcut difficult terrain...

11:34am PT: Thanks for joining us! Our Lifeline Revived AMA has now concluded. For those that didn’t get a direct reply, there may have been an answer to a similar question.

Hey, r/ApexLegends!

From the Rift is well underway, but we wanted to take a moment to focus on the frontline medic turned menace, Lifeline! Our woman of the hour has been revived with new abilities, a revamped D.O.C., and recharged new look that all come with a story to back them. If you’d like a quick refresher, check out our ...

This is rad as hell. That build must've taken forever - gotta get all the details just right, find a way to put it on easily, and make it transportable. That's no easy feat.

Thanks. weird. We'll take a look. That's super helpful.

Whatever you are saying that you cannot access in the store.

Also I just confirmed that unfortunately the Ultimate+ is not currently available in Belgium because of how we grant the immediate rewards. Sorry about that. I will at least see if we can update the website copy to explain that.

you also can't access the event shop? Any chance you can post some screenshots of what you see in the lobby? TIA

I'll check, but it shouldn't be the case that I'm aware of. We have a standard process to swap packs for crafting materials in the game. And I can tell you, we do a LOT of testing for your one small country!

(Give me a couple days to get back to you...)

The two variant skins are locked to the Ultimate+. It's in the More Info button in-game. And also here - https://www.ea.com/games/apex-legends/battle-pass

Specifically, the section "Legend Skin Variants"

Only change for Belgium is that we can't give you Apex Packs so have to give you crafting materials instead.

i've flagged to anti-cheat team.

Yes. Let me see if I can find out when that was/is. I'm not on the rendering team.

you can check DX12 in the EA app or Steam - updated May 2024. https://www.reddit.com/r/apexlegends/comments/16mwzaz/dev_team_update_directx_12_rhi/

Hard to give any feedback on "smoothness." Could even be related to your own network/ISP behavior.

Should be coming back up, but if you're still seeing issues please close out the game, give it a minute, then relaunch. That should refresh it.

I'm so sorry this happened. *if* you encounter this type of behavior and are able to get a recording of any of it, we can take action. In general, it's hard for voice chat to take action absent evidence (unlike text chat), though if you do report them it is followed up on; if there's a lot of reports for the same player(s), I think that makes a difference. But if you are able to get a recording of it, the CS team can take action on that. I know that's not necessarily the first thing on your mind when going through this.

fixed internally. should be going out soon.

I did ask about this specifically when the Tracker system went live. Good reminder to bump this. I am pretty sure we'll add these. I just have no idea when. But I have pointed out that this is missing for all new Legends and for anyone that didn't already have it. I'll ask again.

The artifact system. I've posted about this a bit in some other threads, but that project was massive undertaking. There's no other system in the game that that allows for modular customization in that way* (*Gladiator Cards are also modular, but they have no gameplay element, so they aren't really comparable). Getting that all to work in a scalable and "efficient" (from an engineering perspective) way was a huge task. We had to build a ton of new tech - most/all of which is reusable, but still, it required a lot of new tech. And fixing some OG tech that should have worked but it turned out had been bugged (though not meaningfully so) from the outset. It worked... until we tried to get it to work with Artifacts.

There are 250ish different variants of the Katar itself - blade, power source, and handle - each of which as unique VFX and SFX. Like, getting those all to work - especially in a networked game - was a lot. Plus actually building the customization system. Networking...

I was working at a smallish fit-tech/game company called Zwift. The story of how I came to work at Zwift is quite random, but that's a bit of a tangent. Zwift raised a bunch of money in the time that I was there from VC/Private Equity and just changed a lot culturally, such that I thought I wanted to try working somewhere else.

Because of what I had done prior to working at Zwift, I was connected with the then Art Director on Apex on LinkedIn. And so I reached out to him and was like, "hey, you don't really know me, but you might remember my name. Anyway, I'd like to talk to you about working at Respawn." He was nice enough to respond. I found a couple roles that I thought might be a fit. I interviewed for one role. Got rejected. Applied for another role. The then Game Director Chad Grenier interviewed me and was, essentially, "convince me to hire you." I have a pretty non-traditional background, even for game development. I guess I did okay because I got the job....

Yes, and that was a big part of why we wanted to move to an MMR-based system. But in practice, player sentiment just wasn't there. I think some of it has to do with the natural arc that players had come to expect:

• Ranked is relatively easy at the start
• Ranked then becomes appropriately difficult through the middle as you settle into your skill band
• Ranked then becomes very difficult at the end if you push up into a higher tier that's likely at the upper limit of your skill.

One problem with an MMR-based system is that you lose this. And I think this is what people really didn't like. You could be in Bronze and facing Masters, because that was your skill level. So Ranked was never easy. And for a lot of players, that felt bad.

Now, you can certainly flex a bit on this. Like, you can do a hybrid system where rank is prioritized early and skill is prioritized late, but then you basically wreck the MMR experience...

What I will say is that I certainly don't take Apex's success - or even its existence - for granted. And will reiterate that what matters to players is what matters to me. And while I'd never speak for them, I believe that everyone I work with feels the same way. I know that's a bit of a non-answer. But hopefully also not.

Saturday marks my four year Anniversary at Respawn and on Apex. I get up every day excited to work on this game. And, over time, that excitement has only grown. One special thing about working on a game with a proprietary engine is that you can do literally anything. The more you understand about what your tech does and how it works (or could work), the more interesting things you can build. Every year, this game just gets more fun and more interesting to work on.

But the best part of working on this game is the players. For two reasons. It's a lifetime opportunity to work on a game of this scale. There just are not that many games with a player base this size. And that causes a lot of really maddening and fascinating problems. I've lost track of the number of cases of, "well, this should never happen, but I think there's a chance it could, so I'll defend against it and add some logging to see if it actually does happen." Spoiler: the thing happened.

The ot...